Shadowing Practice: Oppenheimer Wrote One Letter About Feynman — It Changed His Life - Learn English Speaking with Video
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In November 1943, the man in charge of building the atomic bomb stopped to write a job reference.
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Not to a general, not to Washington.
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He was running
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Los Alamos, thousands of people, a secret city, built from scratch in the New Mexico desert.
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The most important and most tightly classified scientific project in the history of the world.
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And in the middle of that, he took the time to sit down and write to a university physics department about a job.
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The man he was recommending was 25 years old and had published almost nothing the outside world would recognize.
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The letter still exists.
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One line from it has been quoted ever since.
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And the people it was sent to did nothing about it.
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The man writing was Robert Oppenheimer.
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The letter went to Raymond Burge, the chairman of the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Oppenheimer's own old department, the place where he had taught before the war, pulled him out to the desert.
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And the young man he was writing about was Richard Feynman.
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To understand why that letter is strange, you have to understand who Feynman actually was at that point,
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because it was not much of anything the public could see.
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He had finished his doctorate at Princeton the year before, in 1942.
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He was good.
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His teachers knew he was good.
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But he was a fresh
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Ph .D., one of thousands of capable young physicists in the country,
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with no great discovery to his name and no reputation outside the small rooms where theoretical physicists argue with each other.
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Early in 1943, he was pulled out to Los Alamos while the laboratory was still half -built,
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roads unpaved, buildings going up around the scientists as they worked.
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He was put into the theoretical division, the group doing the hardest mathematics on the project, and that division was run by Hans Bethe.
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And this is where something happened that doesn't usually happen to a 25 -year -old.
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Beto was one of the senior men in physics.
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He would later win the Nobel Prize for working out how the sun produces its energy.
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At Los Alamos, he needed people who could tear an idea apart
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and find the flaw in it before the project spent six months chasing it.
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He started talking through problems with Feynman, and he found that this young man would argue back,
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would stand in his office and tell him he was wrong, loudly, and then turn out to be right often enough that
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Beta kept coming back for more.
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The two of them worked out a method together for calculating how powerful a fission bomb would be,
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a piece of work that still carries both their names.
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Feynman was handed a group of his own to run.
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By one account, he became the youngest group leader in the entire laboratory.
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He was also, on the side, picking the locks on the filing cabinets where the most secret documents in the country were kept,
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not to steal anything, but to prove the locks were useless
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and to irritate the officers who were sure the secrets were safe.
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That was the person Oppenheimer was writing about.
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Not a famous man, a 25 -year -old who argued with Nobel laureates and cracked government safes for sport,
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and whom the most senior people in the building had quietly decided was the best of all of them.
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So the letter was not a routine favor.
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It was the director of the Manhattan Project telling another institution, this one is worth your attention, and you should move before someone else does.
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Recommendation letters are usually careful things.
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You praise the candidate, you hedge a little, you leave yourself some room.
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Oppenheimer did not hedge.
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He wrote that Feynman was, in his words, by all odds the most brilliant young physicist there, and that everyone knew it.
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That last part is the tell.
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He wasn't offering an opinion for Burge to weigh against other opinions.
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He was reporting something the whole laboratory already agreed on, and telling Burge he was behind the curve.
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He even reminded Burge, in the letter, that he might already know the name, because Feynman had once applied for a fellowship at Berkeley.
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So Berkeley had crossed paths with him once before.
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Then Oppenheimer did something you almost never see in a letter like this.
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He didn't rest on his own word.
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He handed Burge two quotes from other men, and these were not ordinary men.
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The first was Betta, the same Betta who ran the theoretical division, who had Feynman working directly under him.
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Betta said he would rather lose any two other men from the project than lose Feynman.
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Sit with what that means.
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This was wartime, on a project where every single person had been handpicked from the best in the country, where losing anyone set the work back.
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Betta was saying, take two of my people, any two, before you take this one.
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The second quote was from Eugene Wigner.
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Another future Nobel laureate, one of the deepest and most precise thinkers in the field.
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Wigner said that Feynman was a second Dirac, only this time human.
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You have to know who Dirac was for that line to do its work.
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Paul Dirac was one of the strangest and most brilliant physicists who ever lived.
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He had written down an equation and.. from the mathematics alone, predicted that antimatter must exist,
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a mirror version of ordinary matter that nobody had ever seen.
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And then, a few years later, they found it, exactly as the equation said.
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That is almost the purest thing a physicist can do.
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He was also famous for being nearly impossible to talk to.
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He spoke so rarely, and so literally, that other physicists collected stories about him for decades.
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Dirac was the benchmark.
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He was the name you reached for when ordinary words for genius had run out, and Wigner was saying, Feynman belonged in that company,
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the same order of mind, except that you could actually have a conversation with him.
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So this is what sat on Raymond Burge's desk in the winter of 1943.
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The director of the Manhattan Project, the head of its theoretical division, and one of the great minds of the age, all independently, all in writing,
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all pointing at the same 25 -year -old and saying the same thing, above nearly everyone, before the world had the faintest idea who he was.
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What those three men had wasn't a crystal ball.
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It was a way of testing whether something in front of them actually held up, quickly, and without being fooled by a reputation or a title.
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I put the six questions Feynman used to do exactly that, taken from his own lectures and his own writing,
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into a short guide called The Feynman Field Guide to Clear Thinking.
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Linked below.
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Burge read the letter.
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And Berkeley did nothing.
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Not right away.
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Not slowly.
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Not eventually.
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The recommendation went nowhere.
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The most valuable endorsement in American physics landed on a department chairman's desk, and the chairman let it sit there.
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Why?
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For a long time, that was the quiet, unexplained part of the story.
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The physicist and writer Jeremy Bernstein, going back through the record years later, found that Oppenheimer had tried as early as 1943 to get
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Berkeley to bring Feynman in, and that the move was opposed by Burge.
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For some reason, is how Bernstein put it, the reason wasn't written down.
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What the record does show is that relations between Berg and Oppenheimer were strained, and that the chairman simply would not act.
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You can let a thing like that stay a mystery.
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Or you can look at who Raymond Burge was, and at another decision he made, which is not a mystery, because he explained it himself.
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A few years earlier, Oppenheimer had tried to bring a different man into the Berkeley department,
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Robert Serber, one of his own most gifted students and closest collaborators.
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Serber was Jewish.
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Burge blocked it, and in a letter to a colleague explaining himself, he wrote that one
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Jew in the department was enough.
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That is not an interpretation.
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That is what he wrote, and it sits in the histories and on the historical marker at Oppenheimer's old
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Berkeley building to this day.
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Feynman was Jewish too.
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I want to be careful here, because this channel does not do your thinking for you.
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Nobody wrote down Berger's reason for sitting on the Feynman letter.
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The line about one
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Jew being enough was about Serber, not about Feynman, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
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What I can give you is the two facts set down side by side, the way they sat on that desk.
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Oppenheimer sent Berkeley the strongest recommendation of his career.
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The man who received it had already, in his own hand, decided that a department could hold too many of a certain kind of person.
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And he did nothing with the letter in front of him.
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You have probably watched a version of this.
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Not this exact one, but the shape of it.
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Someone with the title, the final say, the name on the door, getting a judgment badly wrong,
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while the people actually doing the work could see it plainly and had no power to move it.
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If you have sat through that, I would like to hear about it.
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What was the job and who was your Burge?
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Here is where you might think you have the point of the story.
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A small, blinkered administrator misses a great talent out of prejudice or pride.
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A cautionary tale with a clear villain.
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That is part of it, but if you stop there, you have only half, because you would still be assuming the letter mattered,
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that if only Burge had acted on it, he would have handed Feynman his future, and the tragedy is that he dropped it.
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That has it backwards.
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The letter did not change Feynman's life, and that is the thing the title quietly takes away, even as it promises it.
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Because Feynman was fine, more than fine.
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While Berkeley sat on its hands, Hans Bethe, the same Bethe who said he would rather lose any two other men,
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simply decided that he wanted Feynman near him when the war was over.
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Bethe was a professor at Cornell.
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Cornell had taken him in as a refugee from Germany in 1935, and he stayed loyal to the place for the rest of his life.
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When the fighting ended, Bethe and his colleagues brought Feynman to Cornell and Feynman went gladly
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because he admired Batha and wanted to keep working beside him.
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There was a harder reason, too.
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Feynman's wife, Arlene, had tuberculosis.
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Through the Los Alamos years, she lived in a sanatorium a few hours away, and he drove out to see her when he could.
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She died in June of 1945, weeks before the first bomb was tested.
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When the war ended, he was a widower at 27, and what he wanted was not an institution bidding for him.
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He wanted to work next to a man he trusted.
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Beta was that man.
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By his own account, he had settled on Cornell before any competing offer could catch up.
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So the Berkeley recommendation was never the hinge it appears to be.
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It did not open a door, because the door that mattered was opened by a man who wanted Feynman personally
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and did not need a letter to tell him so.
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Oppenheimer's recommendation got Feynman nothing.
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Berkeley simply missed him, and that is exactly what makes the letter worth keeping.
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Not because it worked, but because it didn't, and it still turned out to be true in every line.
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Read it again with that in mind.
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Everything Oppenheimer wrote in 1943 was correct.
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The most brilliant, by all odds, and everyone knew it.
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Correct.
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A second Dirac, only human.
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Correct.
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And if anything, an understatement.
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In the years after the war, at Cornell, Feynman built a new way of handling the behavior of light and matter,
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of electrons and photons that had defeated everyone who came before him, including a way of drawing those interactions as simple pictures,
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lines, and squiggles on paper that physicists still use at the blackboard today.
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But here is a scene worth stopping on, because it says something the rest of the story doesn't.
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In the spring of 1948, 27 physicists gathered at a resort hotel in the Pocono Mountains
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of Pennsylvania at a meeting the National Academy of Sciences had called.
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It was not a public event.
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It was the inner circle of the field, in one room.
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Enrico Fermi was there.
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Niels Bohr was there, the man who had built the foundations of quantum theory.
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And Paul Dirac was there, the actual Dirac, the benchmark himself, the man Feynman had been measured against five years earlier,
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in a letter he never saw, sitting in the audience.
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Feynman got up and, for the first time in public, showed them his pictures and his method, and the room could not follow him.
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His approach had antimatter behaving like ordinary matter running backward through time,
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and it got the right answers by physical reasoning rather than by proving each step the way the others expected.
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Bohr thought the young man had forgotten something basic about quantum mechanics, and rose from his seat to correct him at the blackboard.
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Dirac kept pressing him on whether the method was even mathematically consistent, a question Feynman, who trusted it because it worked,
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could not answer to Dirac's satisfaction.
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Edward Teller raised an objection too.
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One by one, the founders of modern physics told him, in effect, that they did not see it.
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They admitted his answers were correct.
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They just could not accept how he was getting them.
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Feynman left the conference disappointed, by some accounts depressed, and went home to write the whole thing up properly instead.
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Hold that against the Burge story for a moment, because they are not the same failure, and the difference matters.
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At Pocono, the greatest physicists alive were wrestling in good faith with something genuinely new and genuinely hard,
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presented badly, late in a long day.
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Skepticism in that room was not a sin, it is how science is supposed to work.
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Within a few years, helped by a young mathematician named Freeman Dyson, who made the method legible to everyone else, the pictures Feynman drew that night,
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became the standard tool of the entire field.
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Even Oppenheimer, who had chaired the discussions, came around and conceded the point.
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The system corrected itself, because the people in it were trying to see.
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Burge was not trying to see.
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That is the whole distinction.
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He had nothing hard in front of him, no five -hour lecture, no half -finished theory.
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He had a clean, plain, one -page conclusion handed to him in writing by the three men in the country,
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best place to reach it, and he did nothing.
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The difference between Pocono and Berkeley is the difference between failing to understand a thing and refusing to look at it,
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which is why the 1943 letter is more remarkable, not less.
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In 1948, with the work in front of them, the founders of physics could not see what Feynman had.
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In 1943, with no work to look at, no diagrams, no
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Nobel, nothing but a young man arguing in a half -built laboratory.
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Oppenheimer and Beitha and Wigner saw all of it.
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They were years ahead of a room that contained Bohr and Dirac.
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And the one man who had their conclusion in his hand, in plain language, filed it away.
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So reckon up what actually happened.
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Feynman went on to share the Nobel Prize in 1965 for that work at Cornell.
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He moved to Caltech and rebuilt how physics was taught to a whole generation.
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And decades later, an old man by then, a television audience of millions,
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watched him sit at a government hearing into the loss of a space shuttle, take a clamped piece of the shuttle's own rubber sealing material,
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drop it into a glass of ice water, and show on camera that the cold had made it stiff.
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The single physical fact that explained why seven people had died.
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The same mind, still cutting straight to the thing that mattered, more than 40 years after the letter.
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All of it was visible in 1943.
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It was written down.
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It was signed by the three men best placed in the country to judge it.
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And it sat in a drawer at Berkeley
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while the man it described went off and did every single thing the letter said he would.
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We tend to assume that recognition is the hard part, that genius goes unseen, that the tragedy is nobody noticing in time.
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Feynman's story says something stranger.
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He was seen, completely, early, in writing, by precisely the right people.
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The recognition was flawless.
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The failure came one step later, at the desk of the man whose only job, in that moment, was to act on it.
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And those are two different things, being right and holding the authority to decide.
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Burge had the authority.
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He was the chairman.
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A little over a decade later, he would be elected president of the American Physical Society.
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The most senior post -American physics could hand a man, and the university would eventually carve his name over the door of a building.
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Beethy and Wigner and Oppenheimer had the judgment.
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When those two things point in opposite directions, it is not always the judgment that wins.
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It is often the title, because the title is the one holding the pen.
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Feynman spent the rest of his life worrying at that exact gap.
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He had no patience for authority that could not show its work,
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not out of rebellion, but because he refused to grant anyone the benefit of the doubt on the strength of their rank.
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A grand title, a confident manner, a committee stamp, none of it counted with him until he had checked the thing himself.
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You can read that as a personality quirk, or as a man who understood,
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better than most, how easily a correct answer dies on the desk of someone who outranks the people who are right.
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The letter is still here.
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You can find it reproduced in the biographies,
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quoted in articles, pulled out whenever someone wants to show how clearly the great physicists saw what was coming.
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It outlived every man who touched it.
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It outlived the decision it was written to change.
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At the University of California, Berkeley, there is a physics building.
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It was dedicated in 1964, and it carries a name above the door.
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The name is Burge Hall.
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It is named for Raymond Burge, the chairman, in honor of his long service to the department.
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Richard Feynman never worked at Berkeley.
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He went to Cornell and then to Caltech, and the letter that recommended him to Berkeley is still in the archive, the most brilliant young physicist,
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by all odds, and everyone knew it, sitting exactly where the man who received it set it down.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Oppenheimer Wrote One Letter About Feynman — It Changed His Life”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: Feynman, letter, Burge, Berkeley. This video has 245 sentences and 3192 words to shadow. The speech runs for 17:55. The speaker talks at a natural 178 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| physics noun | /ˈfɪz.ɪks/ | The branch of science concerned with the study of the properties and interactions of space, time, matter and energy. |
| desk noun | /dɛsk/ | A table, frame, or case, in past centuries usually with a sloping top but now usually with a flat top, for the use of writers and readers. It often has a… |
| recommendation noun | /ˌɹɛkəmɛnˈdeɪʃən/ | An act of recommending. |
| argue verb | /ˈɑɹ.ɡju/ | To show grounds for concluding (that); to indicate, imply. |
| ordinary adjective | /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/ | Having regular jurisdiction; now only used in certain phrases. |
| laboratory noun | /ˈlæb(ə)ɹəˌtɔɹi/ | A room, building or institution equipped for scientific research, experimentation or analysis. |
| theoretical adjective | /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/ | Of or relating to theory; abstract; not empirical. |
| odd adjective | /ɑd/ | Differing from what is usual, ordinary or expected. |
| judgment noun | /ˈd͡ʒʌd͡ʒ.mənt/ | The act of judging. |
| recognition noun | /ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/ | The act of recognizing or the condition of being recognized (matching a current observation with a memory of a prior observation of the same entity). |
| reputation noun | /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/ | What somebody or something is known for. |
| founder noun | /ˈfaʊ̯n.dəː/ | One who founds or establishes (a company, project, organisation, state, etc.). |
| mystery noun | /ˈmɪs.t(ə.)ɹi/ | Something secret or unexplainable; an unknown. |
| badly adverb | /ˈbæd.li/ | In a bad manner. |
| plain noun | /pleɪn/ | An expanse of land with relatively low relief and few trees, especially a grassy expanse. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| write down verb | To produce or set (something) down in writing; to record something. | |
| work out verb | /ˌwɝk ˈaʊt/ | To calculate. |
| catch up verb | To pick up suddenly. | |
| come around verb | /kʌ.məˈɹaʊnd/ | To change one's mind, especially to begin to agree or appreciate what one was reluctant to accept at first. |
| get up verb | To move in an upward direction; to ascend or climb. | |
| go back verb | To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time. | |
| go off verb | To explode. | |
| go up verb | To move upwards. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | has been quoted · was sent · was pulled |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who could · made, which is · man who received |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been quoted · have probably watched · have sat |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 7 contractions and reduced forms, such as wasn't, didn't, doesn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, mathematician /ˌmæθ.(ə.)məˈtɪʃ.ən/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: recommendation /ˌɹɛkəmɛnˈdeɪʃən/, recognition /ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/, reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, institution /ˌɪn.stɪˈtʃuː.ʃən/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/
- Long words — get the stress right: recommendation /ˌɹɛkəmɛnˈdeɪʃən/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, laboratory /ˈlæb(ə)ɹəˌtɔɹi/, theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/, recognition /ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like physics, desk, recommendation.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.